Install WordPress on Raspberry Pi

WordPress the CMS that doesn’t need introduction.In this guide we are going to install it and configure it a bit.

It is required you took the previous steps of setting up the Raspberry, installed php, nginx and mysql.

Setup Url

So far we’ve setup example.local we will create a second url and add configure it. I will use wordpress.local but feel free to use whatever you want.

First lets setup the correct directories.

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/wordpress.local/public_html
sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www/wordpress.local -R
sudo nginx -t && sudo service nginx reload

Create the vhost and fill it with with the following.
sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/wordpress.local.conf

server {
    listen 80;
    
    ## Your website name goes here.
    server_name wordpress.local www.wordpress.local;
    ## Your only path reference.
    root /var/www/wordpress.local/public_html;
    ## This should be in your http block and if it is, it's not needed here.
    index index.php;

    location = /favicon.ico {
            log_not_found off;
            access_log off;
    }

    location = /robots.txt {
            allow all;
            log_not_found off;
            access_log off;
    }

    location / {
            # This is cool because no php is touched for static content.
            # include the "?$args" part so non-default permalinks doesn't break when using query string
            try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
    }

    location ~* .(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ {
            expires max;
            log_not_found off;
    }
    
    location ~ .php$ {
        include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.4-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
        fastcgi_buffers 16 16k;
        fastcgi_buffer_size 32k;
    }
}

This config is the bare minimum as recommended by the nginx manual.
It works but it is not the best. The official WordPress docs has some more examples.
The main thing to improve is security.
I might do a better config in the future but for now this is all.

For the final step reload nginx.

sudo nginx -t && sudo service nginx reload

Create DB

Login to the mysql prompt:

sudo mysql -uroot

After that run the following lines to create a database, create a user with a strong password and assign permissions.

CREATE DATABASE raspimain_db;
CREATE USER 'raspimain_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'P@SSW0RD_Str0nG_R@nD0m_&_L0ng';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `raspimain_db`.* TO `raspimain_user`@`localhost`;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
EXIT;

Download WordPress

Go to the new WordPress directory.

cd /var/www/wordpress.local/public_html/

Download the latest version of WordPress, and unzip it.

sudo wget https://wordpress.org/latest.zip
sudo unzip latest.zip
sudo mv wordpress/* ./
sudo rm -r wordpress latest.zip
sudo chown www-data:www-data . -R

Install WordPress

A few things to check after the install is done.